Just the other day I hopped on a natural gas bus to head to downtown Oakland, enjoying one of the East Bay’s many environmentally-friendly public transit options. But how friendly was that bus to the birds, the bees and the trees? For years, I’ve been told that natural gas is a cleaner-burning fuel, making it a better choice for an era when we need to be more conscious than ever about our environmental footprint — rather than chuffing through the streets in diesel buses, I can help the environment by cruising along on a natural-gas powered bus.

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The Environmental Protection Agency and other groups have been promoting natural gas for a while, so a new study revealing that natural gas comes with a high hidden cost is quite alarming. The researchers think we might be underselling the environmental costs of natural gas, potentially by as much as 75% — their research indicates that we really need to find out more about the problems they’ve identified with the natural gas system in the United States in order to determine the full scope of the issue.

In a nutshell, they discovered that the natural gas system is extremely leaky. Since natural gas is basically methane, the production, transport and storage of natural gas is a giant contributor to greenhouse gases in the environment, which is bad news. You know how those old diesel buses always seemed to fart their way down the streets of urban environments? Well, it turns out natural gas buses are farting too — it’s just happening where you can’t see it, so you might not be aware it’s happening.

We’ve been relying on outdated information to estimate the number of leaks and amount of methane — a gas about 30 times worse than CO2 for the environment — produced by natural gas processing. When researchers actually went out and measured, what they found was a radically different story, and a cause for big concern. The really significant issue are so-called "superemitters" As in other industries, researchers suspect that the bulk of leaks and methane emissions in the natural gas system can be traced back to a few violators, which is actually good news, as it means the issue can be corrected by targeting these particular culprits.Furthermore, the researchers note, it’s still better to burn natural gas than coal.